A warning to Amazon and Facebook…

The reason people use the internet is the diversity of the information and what can be found in exploring. You will note I didn’t put Google in here, even though some of their policies are anti small business / website. So if you believe that people go to Facebook to enjoy their friends and learn about what they are doing, you are likely right, I question if they go there to see things that don’t otherwise know about, ie; explore. Do people go to Amazon to find things to buy, for sure, do they go there to see what their friends are doing or to find more things to buy than what they are interested in? Not very likely.

So my warning to both of these companies is. Don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Facebook and Amazon are basically creating war on small websites and alternative ideologies. Amazon’s sucking down ad revenues from Google is one thing. Making sure that your add gets shown alongside a similar product that they are selling is entirely different.

Facebook deciding what’s “correct” for you to see or not, is not very friendly to the openness of the marketplace of ideas out there. For example if you are selling tactical gear Facebook can and has determined that you can not advertise there. Obviously their prerogative, but is it good for the internet as a whole?

I posit to you that if Amazon and Facebook win the majority of the ad dollars as strange as this sounds it will spell the end of the internet as we know it. It increases the chance that the internet becomes a bar and a store, and that’s pretty much it. It’s great that both companies are successful, but they should stop and think about what’s best for the environment they live in, and censorship and competition against your advertisers is not likely best for that marketplace of ideas and interests.

Things continue down this path and the internet becomes a bar and a store, then the interest in that is going to wane and die. That would not be good for Facebook and Amazon. What do they do when their audience gets bored because there are only two places to go on the internet, Facebook and Amazon?